David Austin Walsh

Jennifer Polk: "Recent PhDs Need to Have Their Confidence Boosted"

by David Austin Walsh

The academc job market remains in the doldrums. Recent PhDs continue to outstrip new positions, and the adjunctification of higher ed. in general -- and historians in particular -- continues unabated. It's not surprising, then, that a growing contingent of recent PhDs are standing athwart academic history yelling 'stop!'

Richard A. Baker: If You Think the Senate is Dysfunctional Now, Wait Until After the Nuclear Option (INTERVIEW)

by David Austin Walsh

The former official historian of the US Senate puts the current dysfunction into perspective.

Report: Adjunct Historians Very Much at Bottom of the Barrel

by David Austin Walsh

Credit: Flickr/Derek Bridges.Adjunct history faculty face heavy workloads, low pay, and poor working conditions, according a new report prepared for the Organization of American Historians.“Adjunct and contingent faculty have a very, very desperate sense of their future,” Edward Reiner, the report's primary author, said in a phone interview. “The consensus, particularly within the humanities, is that adjuncts are treated very poorly, and most never see full-time employment.”

David Barton: Only Four Professors Criticized "The Jefferson Lies"

by David Austin Walsh

David Barton just can't seem to get his facts straight.

Ray Begovich: How I Found Rare Footage of FDR in a Wheelchair

by David Austin Walsh

Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana, has announced that he has discovered an eight-second clip of FDR being pushed in his wheelchair aboard the cruiser U.S.S. Baltimore in July 1944.

Why Doesn't D.C. Have a Military Parade on the Fourth of July?

by David Austin Walsh

On Bastille Day in Paris, the trees lining the Champs-Élysées are covered in the French tricolor. Battalion after battalion of French troops march down the avenue, gleaming bayonets attached to their Space Age rifles. Tanks, armored cars, and nuclear missiles roll past a viewing stand where the French president and his generals look on as martial music plays.It's one of the largest military parades in the world, and it's been going on nearly every year since 1880 (except from 1940-1944, for obvious reasons). Here's what it looks like:Here's what the Fourth of July parade down Constitution Ave. in Washington, D.C. looks like:

The Battle of Gettysburg at 150

by David Austin Walsh

Hancock at Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrup. Credit: Wiki Commons.The Battle of Gettysburg marks its 150th anniversary this week (so does the Union victory at the siege of Vicksburg, but good luck seeing anything about that in the media).To mark the occasion, we've assembled a list of resources -- digital collections, books, and news stories -- about the battle and the Civil War that are worth closer examination.And of course, please share your favorite Civil War books in the comments! We're pretty well read here at HNN, but considering that the amount of works published on the Civil War easily numbers in the tens of thousands, we certainly haven't read (or even heard of) them all!Digital Resources

Historians Played Important Role in DOMA Decision

by David Austin Walsh

Image via Shutterstock.The Supreme Court's decision released Wednesday morning to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act in Windsor v. United States upheld upon arguments made by historians in an amicus brief filed by the American Historical Association.The majority opinion acknowledges that “[b]y history and tradition, the definition and regulation of marriage has been treated as being within the authority and realm of the separate States.”This mirrors language in the brief filed by twenty-three historians of marriage, sexuality, and constitutional law, which stated in its introduction that “[c]ontrol of marital status is reserved to the states in our federal system. Marriage has always been understood as a civil contract embodying a couple’s free consent to join in long-lasting intimate and economic union.”

Eric Foner: VRA Decision "Green Light" to Disenfranchise Voters

by David Austin Walsh

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr. looks on. Credit: Wiki Commons.The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, has struck down the critical Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 legislation that banned discriminatory practices in federal, state, and local election laws.The Voting Rights Act was formulated to target areas with a history of poll tests and historically low registration and turnout for federal oversight. Jurisdictions that fall under the Act's authority are required to pre-clear changes in local election laws with the federal government,Section 4 determined the mechanism of determining the target areas; Section 5 of the Act, which provides for the actual pre-clearance requirement itself, was not ruled upon by the Court.In his majority opinion Chief Justice John Roberts wrote“today the nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”

Gilder Lehrman and Dickinson College Partner for Lincoln Online Course

by David Austin Walsh

Abraham Lincoln in 1865.With all the digital ink spilt over massive open online courses recently, it's easy to forget that while all MOOCs are online courses, not all online courses are MOOCs.Take “Understanding Lincoln,” a new online course co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute Dickinson College. The course, led by Lincoln scholar Matthew Pinsker, will offer a hybrid approach – a smaller seminar section with a hundred-student enrollment cap, direct access to Professor Pinkser and Gilder Lehrman staff, and the opportunity to interact with other students in digital forums.For-credit students will pay $450 and receive three graduate credits at Dickinson, which can be used as transfer credit at other institutions.For those interested in enrichment, a free section featuring lectures and readings will also be available, along with a certificate of completion for those who finish the course.

American Heritage to Subscribers: Sorry, No Refunds

by David Austin Walsh

American Heritage magazine, the embattled quarterly history periodical that suspended print publication in the fall of 2012, is not currently issuing refunds to its 120,000 subscribers, a spokesperson has told HNN.“We're currently restructuring the organization, trying to balance between the non-profit and publishing entities,” said Lee Sutton, online and editorial associate for the magazine. Mr. Sutton said he was not sure about the company's future plans for either refunding subscribers or resumption of publication of the magazine.Mr. Sutton referred our inquiry to the vice president of administration, who did not respond to HNN as of press time.Subscribers are not happy. “I paid for a two-year subscription and received two issues,” wrote one commentator. “No response from AH to my emails. Just hoping someone will take them to court to get our refunds. I used to have respect for AH magazine and its owners.”

Senate History Just Got a Little More Social

by David Austin Walsh

The U.S. Senate Historical Office has just debuted a Twitter feed designed to highlight the digital collections available on its website."Technology changes," says chief Senate historian Donald Ritchie, "and we must constantly adjust" to the ever-changing demands of the public.@SenateHistory went live yesterday, and already has nearly two hundred followers. The opening tweet shone a spotlight on the office's extensive resources on the Senate Watergate committee (the infamous break-in celebrated its forty-first anniversary yesterday).Beth Hahn, historical editor at the Senate Historical Office, said that they are also considering expanding their social media presence to Facebook, as well as other platforms. "We know the National Archives has been doing a lot with Pinterest," she related. Even YouTube is not out of the question -- while most of the Senate oral histories, a major role of the office, are not videotaped, Hahn said that there's a great deal of rare and interesting footage of committee hearings -- including the Watergate hearings -- in the Senate archives.

On Non-Academic Job Market, Your PhD is a Visa, Not a Passport

by David Austin Walsh

Image via Shutterstock.If being a professor will indeed no longer a viable career due to downward pressure from administrations and the disruptive potential of massive online open courses, as Cary Nelson darkly suggested at the American Association of Universty Professors conference in Washington, what are enterprising young graduate students and recent PhDs to do?It's not as if the state of the academic history job market right now is particularly encouraging. Despite an uptick of 18 percent in the number of jobs advertised with the American Historical Association in 2012, the number of PhD receipts for that year alone exceeded the number of job opening by nearly one-third.

"Being a Professor Will No Longer Be a Viable Career."

by David Austin Walsh

With MOOCs the academic freedom of professors is under siege because professors are losing control of their intellectual property, says Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors.

Just How Many History MOOCs are Being Offered Now, Anyway?

by David Austin Walsh

Though many historians are nervous about the potential massive disruption in higher education due to the proliferation of massive online education courses, only a handful of MOOCs are actually dedicated to history. Of four of the largest MOOC providers survey -- Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Semester Online -- only eight history courses actually taught by history faculty are being offered. Popular MOOC provider Coursera only has two dedicated history courses taught by historians open for registration as of June 9, though at least one additional class is in development.EdX, the non-profit MOOC established by Harvard and MIT, also offers eight history classes, but most have a classics or literature focus and are taught by professors from classics, English, or area studies departments. Udacity does not offer history or traditional humanities courses at all, focusing instead on STEM and social science courses.

Environmentalism

Download this backgrounder as a Word documentWorth ReadingFrank Uekoetter: Global Warming – It's 1970 All Over AgainBrian Hamilton: Making “Environmentalism” Relevant for Everyone Nancy Unger: Fifty Years After “Silent Spring,” Let's Not Roll Back Environmental Protections Background

UPenn's Stephanie McCurry to Lead First MOOC on History of Slavery

by David Austin Walsh

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Stephanie McCurry, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a distinguished scholar of the Civil War era, will be leading a new massive online open course this fall about the history of slavery in the United States. It will be based on her popular UPenn course, “The Rise and Fall of the Slave South,” a survey-level class.The course, which has yet to be officially titled, is the product of the partnership between UPenn and the popular MOOC provider Coursera.Professor McCurry says that she became interested in teaching a MOOC after spending three years as undergraduate chair at the university, during which she saw a decline in the number of enrollments in history classes.MOOCs offered an opportunity to shake up the field.“I became interested in pedagogical and curricular questions, and I'd already begun a series of initiatives within my department to move away from standard survey/AP-style courses.”

Coursera Contract with UT System Released; History Chair Says No MOOCs at Knoxville This Fall

by David Austin Walsh

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee system, will not be providing massive online open courses for the Silicon Valley tech startup Coursera in the coming semester, says UT Knoxville history department chair Thomas Burman.“This decision does not affect us at all,” he wrote in an email.Only two classes will be offered on the Coursera platform across the entire UT system in fall 2013: an introductory music course at the Martin campus, and freshman English composition at UT Chattanooga.The Tennessean reports that the Coursera partnership is an internal pilot program designed to familiarize faculty with online courses and new technology. The courses offered by the program will only be available on a for-credit basis to already-enrolled UT students.No history courses are planned to be offered under the program.“When the topic [of online education] came up for a wide-ranging discussion among campus leadership [in 2011],” Bruman wrote, “the widely-shared view, including among the central academic administrators, was that on-line teaching has a place in a limited number of areas here, especially in the professional schools, but is not what this campus is about.”

Historians at MOOC Partner Schools Say Faculty Not Consulted

by David Austin Walsh

Image via Shutterstock.“When colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet,” Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State, wrote back in 2011, “most professors will lose their jobs.”With the proliferation of massive online open courses (MOOCs), Stross wrote in an email to HNN, that time may have come.On May 30, Coursera, the Silicon Valley MOOC provider founded by Stanford University computer scientists in 2012, announced that it had just signed agreements with ten state universities systems to produce and share online courses for credit.The signatories are the University of Colorado, the University System of Georgia, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska system, the University of New Mexico system, the State University of New York system, the University of Tennessee system and the Tennessee Board of Regents system, and West Virginia University.

Niall Ferguson Meets with Students; Harvard Faculty Clarify Stance

by David Austin Walsh

Credit: Flickr.UPDATE 12:13PM: David Armitage, chair of the Harvard history department, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the department requested a "post in the modern history of gender and sexuality (jointly with Harvard's program in women and gender studies) long before the recent debate arose." He also pointed to the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi, Nancy Cott, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich as an example of Harvard's pre-existing strength in the field of gender and sexuality studies.Historian Niall Ferguson, in an attempt to blunt criticism of his recent controversial remarks about John Maynard Keynes's sexuality, spoke on Monday to students at a lunchtime panel at the Harvard College Women's Center.